Abstracts

The NVO Portal, Tom McGlynn

Over the past year the NVO has developed a set of interlinked applications
that work together as a portal to enable users to quickly discover, access and
combine information from the virtual observatory. Portal services are
distributed among NVO hosts and integrate both Web and CLI based interfaces.
In addition to describing the portal capabilities, we discuss how portal
elements communicate and collaborate to form a coherent system rather than
discrete tools.

VODesktop is an integrated suite of powerful but user-friendly VO access
software. GUI components and a parallel daemon-based scriptable interface are
provided for accessing a wide range of VO services including Registry,
VOSpace, CEA, ADQL, Cone Search, SIAP and SSAP.

Microsoft Research WorldWide Telescope and the VO, Jonathan Fay

Jim Gray and Alex Szalay envisioned using the Web as way to make astronomy
data available to everyone. Microsoft's Research has introduced the WorldWide
Telescope, dedicated to Jim Gray, to open up Astronomy data not just to
scientist, but also to anyone who wants to study astronomy or experience the
universe. As a tool for astronomy WWT will allow the integration of VO
capabilities into a rich visualization environment. WWT Pro will go beyond the
broad reach product provide a rich workflow and deep tools for researchers to
use the VO facilities easily and visually.

VIM assumes that an astronomer wants information about a specific set of 10 to
1000 positions (points in the sky). Proximity searches are performed with
respect to archived catalogs, with image cutouts and quantitative spectral
access. Features include: Installation in a laptop or a server, with
persistent workbench storage for each customer; Simple ways to share results
with colleagues; A web GUI for manipulating those data objects in the
workbench, based on Yahoo UI; A standard way to build new tools that are then
exposed and driven by the Web GUI; Each tool is also a Python function that
can be called from a script; and finally and recursively, a way to accumulate
a script from a web session, that can be edited and run again.

Aladin 5, P.Fernique, T.Boch, F.Bonnarel, A.Oberto

The last Aladin version has been released in February. This release is
implementing some new VO developements. We will demonstrate a useful mechanism
for helping PLASTIC compatible VO tool installation and some improvements on
the instruments Field of View integrations.We will also demonstrate some new
features developed for the next release: the full screen mode and the
"skybrowser" navigation plane based on a Healpix index.

A data and services portal at Paris Observatory.
Jonathan Normand

Paris Observatory owns many data but unfortunatly the way to get them is
difficult. The interests of this internet portal are :
- to provide an easy web access to all this data using only one query form
based on VO protocols.
- to provide services on data using Paris Observatory computation facilities
(188 cores cluster).

As this is an internet portal there is no need to install software to use
it. Anything can be done from the web interface without having to know the VO:
get available data, launch services on selected data then get the results. The
architecture of services follows the REST principles.

Evolution of Saada - Laurent Michel

Saada 1.5: How to quickly build a database containing spectra, source lists
and images, how to easily associate data each to other and how to publish them
within the VO.

We present the Horizon GalMer database, containing results of simulations of
galaxy interactions, realized by means of the Tree-SPH code. The database
provides a prototypical implementation of the SNAP Data Model.

We have built a set of value-added services accessible online and in the VO
including: (1) generation of column density maps, radial velocity and velocity
dispersion maps, mass-weighted maps of age and metallicity of stars; (2)
generation of high-resolution optical synthetic spectra of stellar populations
in the interacting galaxies using PEGASE.HR stellar population models; (3)
generation of multi-wavelength (far-UV to near-IR) broadband colour maps using
PEGASE.2 stellar population models. The latter two services may include the
dust extinction.

Providing these services makes our database a unique resource allowing direct
comparison of simulated datasets with observations. We will describe a number
of possible scientific applications of the GalMer database and associated
services.

The NVO Table Importer, John McCorquodale

Users of the Virtual Observatory complain about many things, including the
difficulty of taking text-based tables for import into VO tools. The NVO Table
Importer is a pure javascript application that takes a text representation of
a table, asks straightforward questions of the user, and creates a VOTable,
understanding sexagesimal coordinates, assigning datatypes to columns,
allowing input of column names and UCDs. The Table Importer scales to very
large tables, and allows direct copy/paste of source tables from PDF documents
such as those from astro-ph or ApJ.

VO For Mobile Devices. Mike Fitzpatrick

VO data and services universally rely on network connectivity, but much can be
done without relying on desktop screen real-estate or bandwidth/storage common
to Grid applications. Exploratory science relies on the ability to quickly
answer a question in terms of whether it is worth pursuing with more advanced
tools, not that you can do the final analysis. Mobile devices such as the
iPhone/iPod Touch provide the connectivity to allow VO queries and an
interface that makes pocket-computing practical using simple web-applications.
I will present a web-application for the iPhone platform that demonstrates its
viability in simple VO use, and discuss extensions that could be implemented
to integrate spontaneous mobile queries with detailed analysis using more
conventional platforms.

Recent Developments in VOI Products. Ajit Kembhavi

I will discuss a new version of VOPlot, a new version of VOStat, and a simple
working platform. I will also talk about a new project that VOI is taking up
for archiving GMRT data.

Plastic Firefox, Sebastien Derriere

Mining data using MatLab through Astrobox, Chao LIU and Chenzhou Cui

AstroBox is a MatLab toolkit under developing by the China-VO. We completed a
PLASTIC module for MatLab so that it can work together with other VO tools. We
plan to collect popular statistic and data mining algorithms into the
AstroBox. So, astronomers can use it easily on MatLab platform.